Fonts with a Long s?

[benkiel]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

A grad student friend of mine is looking for faces with a long s as part of the character set. i'm at a loss, other then Lucida Grande. Any suggestions?

[antiuser]

Broadsheet has it, if I recall correctly.

[gerald_giampa]

Ben,

http://www.lanstontype.com/CaslonFountEight.html
http://www.lanstontype.com/CaslonGiampa.html
http://www.lanstontype.com/CaslonNo337.html
http://www.lanstontype.com/CaslonATF.html

This font is complete with long S and Swash Italic. There are 17 fonts in total.


Gerald Giampa
Lanston Type Company

[jfp]

Le Monde Livre Classic, Sabon Next LT

[gerald_giampa]

Jean,

Sabon? Somehow I can't imagine. For some reason it does not sound suitable!


Gerald Giampa
Lanston Type Company

[Miss Tiffany]

Gerald -- Why doesn't it sound suitable?

[Nick Shinn]

Adobe Caflon Pro.

On a related note, Thomas Phinney previewed new OpenType fupport features in Illuftrator Next at the recent ATypI conference, but there is ftill no "hiftorical" mode.

[hrant]

Nick, sunny.

hhp

[kakaze]

The Microſoft core fonts have the long s in them too.

Words like Caſlon and Illuſtrator and hiſtorical can be spelled without uſing an f.

heh

[kakaze]

Aww crap, the board didn't parse the characters!

[benkiel]

Thanks all, especially Nick for the humor, I've passed on your suggestions to my friend.

[gerald_giampa]

Tiffany,

It was a question I have since answered. It would be suitable for Sabon to have a long s.


Gerald Giamp
Lanston Type Company

[jfp]

Well, long s seems to work in Sabon Next.
 

[gerald_giampa]

Jean,

I must say I am glad I asked the question. Very nice.

Gerald Giampa
Lanston Type Company

[andreas]

Jean,

how Sabon Next activates the long s and its ligatures? hist & hlig feature?

How does the application / feature code "knows" on which situation the long s should be set or not?

Example: the German words "besser" & "Lesbarkeit"
with long s: "b e long_ss_ligature e r" but Lesbarkeit with normal s

[jfp]

well, if the family was OpenType, yes, there is some way to active long s depending of the language restrictions. Le Monde Livre Classic OT (OT done by John Hudson to demonstrate some OT features back in 2001) use this fonction.

Sabon Next LT to date still only PostScript and TrueType. But all glyphs have been designed to built a future OT version. Its up to Linotype to do it I think.

[John Hudson]

The use of the long s in German, like several other aspects of German typography, is pretty much impossible to automate without a dictionary. It is possible with OpenType to provide basic contextual handling of the long s, and to use Language System tags to vary the handling for different typographic traditions, but German has too many lexically-determined exceptions to a general rule.

[andreas]

John,

do you suggest to use hlig and hist feature for long_s but to make an exception for German? How about Dutch?

Any other exception?

[John Hudson]

I think the <hlig> feature may be redundant. If a user wants the long s, he probably wants the ligatures associated with it that are appropriate for his language, so I would use the <hist> feature to substitute the long s, using contextual lookups for those languages that have rules about where the substitution may occur, and then the <liga> feature for any ligatures. The only reason I can think of for the <hlig> feature is if you wanted users to be able to turn the long s ligatures off without affecting other ligatures. Frankly, though, I don't expect to see the <hlig> feature supported any time soon, at least not with its own UI function, which is what it would need to make it at all useful.

I don't know what all the rules are for the long s in German, so I can't say what would be the best way to approach this.

[hrant]

If an app has a German spell-checker, couldn't it figure out where to use a "long s" correctly?

hhp

[John Hudson]

Spell-checkers are character-based and don't know anything about glyph-level processing. Theoretically, a dictionary-driven German typesetting system could be developed -- John Butler and I have mused about this in the past --, but nothing even close exists, to my knowledge.

[Thomas Phinney]

I have to agree with John that the long-s ligatures belong in either 'liga' or 'dlig' and there's no need for a separate 'hlig' feature.

That's the one downside of having spec'd a whole ton of features before building fonts and apps to support them. We made a couple of mistakes. That was one of them. (Also, anybody remember the 'crcy' currency feature? Ewww.)

Regards,

T

[andreas]

Thomas,

do you thing long_s is not an historic thing? Or should we use the dlig instead of hlig?

hlig is not supported by InDesign2. In one of my last procejts I have used both hlig & dlig with the same code.

[gerald_giampa]

I don't know if Sabon has the f_j ligature. I am wondering if Open Type has included it.

Just a question. I have seen many fonts without.


Gerald Giampa
Lanston Type Company

[Thomas Phinney]

Gerald:

These are two separate questions. OpenType is capable of any arbitrary ligature a type designer cares to create. However, I don't know if Sabon has the f_j ligature. Some Adobe fonts have it, but far from all.

Andreas:

Sure, the long_s is a historic thing. So use the 'hist' feature if you like to get the glyph in there. But once you've got it in text, there's no need for a *special* ligature feature with it. Any long_s ligatures you either want on by default (liga), or off by default (dlig).

Put another way, if every substitution feature were to need a separate corresponding ligature feature, we'd need an amazingly large number of ligature features.

But luckily for us, features are cumulative. Whether it's swashes or small caps or historical forms, they can interact with the main ligature features (liga, dlig, clig) to create just about any combination effect needed.

T